Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) (12 page)

The trained seal’s restaurant was only a sheen of light off toward the ocean. Stahr cranked down a window and looked for landmarks, but after a few more miles the fog fell away, and just ahead of them the road turned off that led to his house. Out here a moon showed behind the clouds. There was still a shifting light over the sea.

The house had dissolved a little back into its elements. They found the dripping beams of a doorway and groped over mysterious waist-high obstacles to the single finished room, odorous of sawdust and wet wood. When he took her in his arms, they could just see each other’s eyes in the half darkness. Presently his raincoat dropped to the floor.

“Wait,” she said.

She needed a minute. She did not see how any good could come from this, and though this did not prevent her from being happy and desirous, she needed a minute to think how it was, to go back an hour and know how it had happened. She waited in his arms, moving her head a little from side to side as she had before, only more slowly, and never taking her eyes from his. Then she discovered that he was trembling.

He discovered it at the same time, and his arms relaxed. Immediately she spoke to him coarsely and provocatively, and pulled his face down to hers. Then, with her knees she struggled out of something, still standing up and holding him with one arm, and kicked it off beside the coat. He was not trembling now and he held her again, as they knelt down together and slid to the raincoat on the floor.

Afterwards they lay without speaking, and then he was full of such tender love for her that he held her tight till a stitch tore in her dress. The small sound brought them to reality.

“I’ll help you up,” he said, taking her hands.

“Not just yet. I was thinking of something.”

She lay in the darkness, thinking irrationally that it would be such a bright indefatigable baby, but presently she let him help her up…. When she came back into the room, it was lit from a single electric fixture.

“A one-bulb lighting system,” he said. “Shall I turn it off?”

“No. It’s very nice. I want to see you.”

They sat in the wooden frame of the window seat, with the soles of their shoes touching.

“You seem far away,” she said.

“So do you.”

“Are you surprised?”

“At what?”

“That we’re two people again. Don’t you always think—hope that you’ll be one person, and then find you’re still two?”

“I feel very close to you.”

“So do I to you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Thank
you.
”

They laughed.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asked. “I mean last night.”

“Not consciously.”

“I wonder when it was settled,” she brooded. “There’s a moment when you needn’t, and then there’s another moment when you know nothing in the world could keep it from happening.”

This had an experienced ring, and to his surprise he liked her even more. In his mood, which was passionately to repeat yet not recapitulate the past, it was right that it should be that way.

“I
am
rather a trollop,” she said, following his thoughts. “I suppose that’s why I didn’t get on to Edna.”

“Who is Edna?”

“The girl you thought was me. The one you phoned to—who lived across the road. She’s moved to Santa Barbara.”

“You mean she was a tart?”

“So it seems. She went to what you call call-houses.”

“That’s funny.”

“If she had been English, I’d have known right away. But she seemed like everyone else. She only told me just before she went away.”

He saw her shiver and got up, putting the raincoat around her shoulders. He opened a closet, and a pile of pillows and beach mattresses fell out on the floor. There was a box of candles, and he lit them around the room, attaching the electric heater where the bulb had been.

“Why was Edna afraid of me?” he asked suddenly.

“Because you were a producer. She had some awful experience or a friend of hers did. Also, I think she was extremely stupid.”

“How did you happen to know her?”

“She came over. Maybe she thought I was a fallen sister. She seemed quite pleasant. She said ‘Call me Edna’ all the time—‘Please call me Edna,’ so finally I called her Edna and we were friends.”

She got off the window seat so he could lay pillows along it and behind her.

“What can I do?” she said. “I’m a parasite.”

“No, you’re not.” He put his arms around her. “Be still. Get warm.”

They sat for awhile quiet.

“I know why you liked me at first,” she said. “Edna told me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That I looked like—Minna Davis. Several people have told me that.”

He leaned away from her and nodded.

“It’s here,” she said, putting her hands on her cheekbones and distorting her cheeks slightly. “Here and here.”

“Yes,” said Stahr. “It was very strange. You look more like she actually
looked
than how she was on the screen.”

She got up, changing the subject with her gesture as if she were afraid of it.

“I’m warm now,” she said. She went to the closet and peered in, came back wearing a little apron with a crystalline pattern like a snowfall. She stared around critically.

“Of course we’ve just moved in,” she said, “—and there’s a sort of echo.”

She opened the door of the veranda and pulled in two wicker chairs, drying them off. He watched her move, intently, yet half afraid that her body would fail somewhere and break the spell. He had watched women in screen tests and seen their beauty vanish second by second, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meagre joints of a paper doll. But Kathleen was ruggedly set on the balls of her feet—the fragility was, as it should be, an illusion.

“It’s stopped raining,” she said. “It rained the day I came. Such an awful rain—so loud—like horses weeing.”

He laughed.

“You’ll like it. Especially if you’ve got to stay here. Are you going to stay here? Can’t you tell me now? What’s the mystery?”

She shook her head.

“Not now—it’s not worth telling.”

“Come here then.”

She came over and stood near him, and he pressed his cheek against the cool fabric of the apron.

“You’re a tired man,” she said, putting her hand in his hair.

“Not that way.”

“I didn’t mean that way,” she said hastily. “I meant you’ll work yourself sick.”

“Don’t be a mother,” he said.

“All right. What shall I be?”

Be a trollop, he thought. He wanted the pattern of his life broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he wanted to stop being Stahr for awhile and hunt for love like men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who looked along the streets in the dark.

“You’ve taken off my apron,” she said gently.

“Yes.”

“Would anyone be passing along the beach? Shall we put out the candles?”

“No, don’t put out the candles.”

Afterwards she lay half on a white cushion and smiled up at him.

“I feel like Venus on the half shell,” she said.

“What made you think of that?”

“Look at me—isn’t it Botticelli?”

“I don’t know,” he said smiling. “It is if you say so.”

She yawned.

“I’ve had such a good time. And I’m very fond of you.”

“You know a lot, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, from little things you’ve said. Or perhaps the way you say them.”

She deliberated.

“Not much,” she said. “I never went to a university, if that’s what you mean. But the man I told you about knew everything and he had a passion for educating me. He made out schedules and made me take courses at the Sorbonne and go to museums. I picked up a little.”

“What was he?”

“He was a painter of sorts and a hell-cat. And a lot besides. He wanted me to read Spengler—everything was for that. All the history and philosophy and harmony was all so I could read Spengler, and then I left him before we got to Spengler. At the end I think that was the chief reason he didn’t want me to go.”

“Who was Spengler?”

“I tell you we didn’t get to him,” she laughed, “and now I’m forgetting everything very patiently, because it isn’t likely I’ll ever meet anyone like him again.”

“Oh, but you shouldn’t forget,” said Stahr, shocked. He had an intense respect for learning, a racial memory of the old
schules.
“You shouldn’t forget.”

“It was just in place of babies.”

“You could teach your babies,” he said.

“Could I?”

“Sure you could. You could give it to them while they were young. When I want to know anything, I’ve got to ask some drunken writer. Don’t throw it away.”

“All right,” she said, getting up. “I’ll tell it to my children. But it’s so endless—the more you know, the more there is just beyond, and it keeps on coming. This man could have been anything if he hadn’t been a coward and a fool.”

“But you were in love with him.”

“Oh, yes—with all my heart.” She looked through the window, shading her eyes. “It’s light out there. Let’s go down to the beach.”

He jumped up, exclaiming:

“Why, I think it’s the grunion!”

“What?”

“It’s tonight. It’s in all the papers.” He hurried out the door, and she heard him open the door of the car. Presently he returned with a newspaper.

“It’s at ten-sixteen. That’s five minutes.”

“An eclipse or something?”

“Very punctual fish,” he said. “Leave your shoes and stockings and come with me.”

It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn, and the little silver fish rocked off shore waiting for 10.16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide, and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop on the sand. A negro man came along the shore toward them, collecting the grunion quickly, like twigs, into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful, around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore.

“I wish for another pail,” the negro man said, resting a moment.

“You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr.

“I used to go to Malibu, but they don’t like it, those moving picture people.”

A wave came in and forced them back, receded swiftly, leaving the sand alive again.

“Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked.

“I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson. Have you ever read him?”

“I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.”

“I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian literature with me, too, but I’m fed up with them.”

The wind had changed a little—the waves were stronger further down, and they walked along the foaming edge of the water.

“What’s your work,” the negro asked Stahr.

“I work for the pictures.”

“Oh.” After a moment he added, “I never go to movies.”

“Why not?” asked Stahr sharply.

“There’s no profit. I never let my children go.”

Stahr watched him, and Kathleen watched Stahr protectively.

“Some of them are good,” she said, against a wave of spray; but he did not hear her. She felt she could contradict him and said it again, and this time he looked at her indifferently.

“Are the Rosicrucian brotherhood against pictures?” asked Stahr.

“Seems as if they don’t know what they
are
for. One week they for one thing and next week for another.”

Only the little fish were certain. Half an hour had gone, and still they came. The negro’s two pails were full, and finally he went off over the beach toward the road, unaware that he had rocked an industry.

Stahr and Kathleen walked back to the house, and she thought how to drive his momentary blues away.

“Poor old Sambo,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t you call them poor old Sambo?”

“We don’t call them anything especially.” After a moment, he said, “They have pictures of their own.”

In the house she drew on her shoes and stockings before the heater.

“I like California better,” she said deliberately. “I think I was a bit sex-starved.”

“That wasn’t quite all, was it?”

“You know it wasn’t.”

“It’s nice to be near you.”

She gave a little sigh as she stood up, so small that he did not notice it.

“I don’t want to lose you now,” he said. “I don’t know what you think of me or whether you think of me at all. As you’ve probably guessed, my heart’s in the grave—” He hesitated, wondering if this was quite true. “—but you’re the most attractive woman I’ve met since I don’t know when. I can’t stop looking at you. I don’t know now exactly the color of your eyes, but they make me sorry for everyone in the world—–”